Sorry for this long post.
I had a good little drive/adventure.
The only thing I had been successful at in stopping on the alerts etc on the car was the introduction tune when I opened the car and got into it. But I could not stop the swirly pattern that plays across my dashboard as part of the welcome tune.
The next noise is a series of beeps when I put the car key in, and I have no idea what the reason for that is for and that goes on for about a minute before it stops. This is most annoying. I do not need an alert that I put the key in my car, my last car never did anything like this.
The next alert that comes on is my seat belt alarm. The cars in my road are parked on both sides and is not easy to see as I'm inching out of the driveway and I don't put my seat belt on until I've got out of my driveway because the space is to get out is very tight and because otherwise I can't reach forward to see around the car that's parked on the right of me, it's usually a big van. And I might need to backward and forward a couple times and I need to swivel around to check that I am not too near to the car is on the left of me or on the right of me and the other side because that's a large van also a workvan that belongs to the person who lives there. But there are only inches to spare in doing this manoeuvre, and while I am doing it, I have got a seatbelt alarm screaming at me.
As soon as I'm straight in the road I put the seat belt on but I've already had enough of all these alarms. My road is a cult-de-sac, and it's very narrow.
A few minutes later I stop at a local shop and I'm getting the alarm I've left 'the children' in my backseat. It's my walker (which is activating that alert) and which I'm about to take out to use to go to the shops.
All these alarms have different warning noises which I cannot get my head around and I'm already frazzled with the amount of different noises from the car I am getting into my cochlear processor before I have even properly started my journey.
I got what I needed it at the shop, and when I get back into the car I've got this silly noise beeping at me when I put the key in again and I have to listen to that again Then, because I'm parked in a side road I need to turn right into the main road but there's a car in front of me also turning right and he is halfway into the main road the way you do when you're trying to stop the traffic but has no intention of letting you in. In the distance I can see the blue lights of a police car and so the traffic lets him in but obviously I do not move that point. My car then gives me some intense sound alerts, and words, telling me that the leading driver has moved on. And the sound alerts do not shut up, but I cannot move until this police car has gone past me in the main road. By this time I have had more than enough of the stupid sound alerts of my car.
I tried pressing the ok button, my last car had an instruction that if a sound alert was on and you couldn't do anything about it or whatever then you press the ok button to say you knew about it and it would stop but that doesn't work like that with this car.
At this point I am still wearing my cochlear sound processor as normal.
My plan at this point was go to the nearby car shop where I was going to get one of two things. The first thing I wanted was some, I'm not quite sure what you call them, but some clips to go into the seat belts on the back to fool the car into thinking that the seat belts were actually pushed in. But the car shop did not have any of those (they are on Amazon but I needed something now). So Plan B was to buy a set of car seat covers where I could fasten the seat belts put the car covers over the seat belts, and then I can still push my walker or other devices I need on to the back seat without catching on the seat belts and making it impossible. Also the seat covers would have the dual purpose of the seat belts permanently locked into their holders (underneath them) and so the seat belt alarms would not sound nor the stupid black and yellow circles on the dashboard flash incessantly at me.
I got the seat belts locked. And then I got the car seat covers on top of them and then I put my walker back, (on the back seat) in the car easily and effortlessly without catching on seat belts.
I get back in the car and there's no warnings on the dashboard about seat belts, no noises, no alerts, and no black and yellow circles flashing at me about the back seat belts not fastening in my passenger (my walker).
The only annoying sound warning at this point was the fact that my key was in to turn the engine on.
So now was Part 2 of my plan.
I had made up a driving playlist which could be played on my other device (not my phone) which could be played offline. This was to deal/silence to me, with all the other alerts that happen as I drive in this car. There's a list of them in the manual. Supposedly warning things to keep you safe as you are driving.
So I turned on my playlist and I cannot hear any normal external noise/warning at all once the playlist is playing. It streams the music to my cochlear processor. And I am now back to driving just using visuals which I managed with for 50 years before I had the cochlear implant.
The two warnings that did crop up today, and would have had sound alarm alerts with them was the lane assist, which is an absolute pain in the wotsit because I go to avoid a pothole on the left and the lane assist is telling me I'm too near to the line in the middle of the road. But on this car it also has something called Lane Centering Assist. And it turns the steering wheel slightly (itself) to put you back in the centre of the lane.
And I end up going through the pothole I was trying to avoid. It cannot sense when there is a brick in the road I'm trying to avoid or some other objects that have fallen off a lorry, it cannot sense a cyclist for some reason that I'm trying to go around, or a runner in the road, or if I'm trying to give an extra large vehicle on the other side coming towards me more room and so I go very much to the curb edge. This lane assist and the other thing are wrong more often than they are right. This lane assist does not respond well to merging lines, and gets it wrong.
So in addition to the green lane thing flashing at you on the screen that you're not in the centre of your lane, you have these audible warnings which get louder and louder. It is the amplified audible warnings through my cochlear sound processor that completely fries my brain because I'm looking all over the place for the what is the warning thing. And I cannot concentrate on the thing I'm actually trying to avoid whether it is a person a cyclist or a brick.
And the second thing cropped up was a similar thing from earlier, that the leading driver is moving on, and there would have been audible warnings with that, increasing in intensity when I did not move on. But again this was because an ambulance was coming and I was not moving until the ambulance had gone past and then I was going to move.
But as I said once I put the car seat covers on earlier, and sorted the seat belts, I put my music playlist on streaming directly to my processor, and consequently I did not hear any of these audible warnings but I could see them all on the dashboard and that was absolutely adequate as a warning. The worst one today was the lane assist It came up again and again and again, and each time it was wrong because there was a reason some rubble in the road, some fallen tree branches, a cyclist, a lorry that was rather wide coming towards me so I moved over, there's one more what was it... ah yes the many potholes are in the road at the moment.
I cannot see how this can in any way be perceived as a safety feature.
No wonder I am totally frazzled each time I come home from driving and I go to bed with a fried brain.
But not today. The majority of my trip was with the music streaming to my processor so that I did not pick up any of the audible warnings and that made this a much nicer easier more relaxing drive where I could actually concentrate properly on the driving instead of wondering what audible warning was going to assault me next.
I had a good day, had a meal in a small cafe which two older (larger) ladies run, and I've only been there I think three times last year, but they remembered me and I was greeted warmly and one gave me a huge bear hug and I had some lovely delicious home cooked food.
And when I got home, I have been out all day, I wasn't totally exhausted like I normally am.
This car manufacturer, in this car has gone totally overboard on safety measures which are more a distraction and a danger than actually safety measures.
I can now look forward to driving now even just a small trip down to the local shops, but I do need this playlist and I need to make this music playlist a bit better. So that is my next project tomorrow to work out a better offline playlist for driving.
I have realised today that what has been affecting me with this is overstimulation on my senses with all these alarms and alerts, and there are too many from my brain to cope with. Probably too many for anybody to cope with. But I was born profoundly deaf. I had no noise input until I had the cochlear implant 15 years ago, so all my life I have not known there was things as alarms and alerts noises at all. And when I realised there was noises and alerts like my mobile phone the kettle whistling, I had a whistling kettle then, I had no idea I was going to get all these noises and I could not recognise what they were because J died just after I had the implant and he was supposed to be helping me sort out what these noises alarms and everything were and so I never had that kind of education on them because he wasn't there anymore.
Have a song - could be several meanings intended
Lyrics for you Genn. Map and some info (I loved teaching this stuff for GCSE history back in the day in that there Saart Lundin - the other option was Elizabethan England
